Intel Haswell Core processor officially announced

Intel has kicked off its Developer’s Forum in San Francisco with a wide-ranging keynote detailing the company’s plans for our computing future

Front and center was the company’s new Haswell Core processor, developed for mobile PCs, including Intel’s own Ultrabook platform.

According to David (Dadi) Perlmutter, Intel’s chief product officer, the new processor is most power-efficient chip the company has ever produced.

The benefits will include all-day battery life on laptops that will be even lighter and thinner than Intel’s current 20mm Ultrabook requirement.

The Haswell Core processor is apparently 20 times more efficient than current Sandy Bridge laptops.

“The 4th generation Intel Core processor family and our new line of low-power processors will usher in an era of unprecedented innovation in mobile computing,” Pearlmutter said.

Intel also revealed plans to incorporate speech, touch and gesture into Ultrabooks and PCs.

Given the touch-focused nature of Windows 8 and the popularity of Siri on the iPhone, this isn’t entirely surprising.

Pearlmutter used the keynote to show a Dell Ultrabook running Nuance’s Dragon Assistant voice-recognition software and confirmed that Ultrabooks running the program would be available later this year.

Where Intel has not been so strong is in the mobile space, and the company seems keen to change that. Pearlmutter explained that the next-generation Intel Atom processors – which are codenamed “Clover Trail” – would be arriving soon.

The Clover Trail chips will run on 32nm architecture and will offer longer battery life and always-on technology for the wave of forthcoming Windows 8 tablets we’re expecting to crash after the new OS arrives in October.